Stanley Zhong had a 4.42 GPA from a prestigious high school in Palo Alto and a near perfect SAT score — 1590 out of 1600. He also founded his own tech startup and tutored low-income kids in coding. The teen was so impressive that he was hired by Google right out of high school.
That’s lucky because he was rejected by a full roster of colleges, ABC reported, including: MIT, Carnegie Mellon, Stanford, UC Berkeley, UCLA, UC San Diego, UC Santa Barbara, UC Davis, Cornell University, the University of Illinois, the University of Michigan and Caltech. He was also denied by the University of Washington, the University of Wisconsin and Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. Overall, he was snubbed by 16 out of 18 colleges, including five UC schools.
Zhong, now 19, and his father, Nan Zhong, a manager at Google, filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California, alleging the University of California illegally engages in racial discrimination in its admissions.
The use of race was banned by California voters through Proposition 209 in 1996 and affirmed in an unrelated U.S. Supreme Court case involving Harvard in 2023.
“First of all, in addition to Stanley, there are a lot of Asian American students who actually contacted us about their college admissions stories. How they were rejected by UCs, despite their outstanding qualifications, similar to Stanley’s,” ABC reported Nan Zhong as saying.
“Evidence number two: We have collected evidence that the UC is using race, in clear violation of the law, in faculty hiring. And to the degree that it’s not only using it, but they’re also knowing it’s illegal, and they’re also hiding the evidence of using it.
“Evidence number three: We also looked at some of the limited available public data, and there’s a clear suppression of Asian enrollment, despite the strong growth of the Asian community here in California,” Zhong said.
EdSource is California’s largest independent newsroom focused on Education.